death

I wrote this poem a few years ago, on the first spring after my little brother flew out of his flesh and bones. I remember thinking that loss alters the way most of us relate to everything… even the changes of the season.

The Universe was pulling me away. I pulled back, held on to ropes made of love-thickened tears, turned myself into memory, and pushed it into the Universe. “See my soul. See her.”

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From a snowy garden, a lifetime away, I see my Human for the first time. Her mouth says, “Our house isn’t big enough for all this energy”. But her soul, the truest part of her, sings, She’s an angel—alive, happy, mine.

Then I show the Universe my Human and me around the house, living and doing, being the shadows of each other’s souls. Together, always… always, Together.

.Enough. The Universe stopped my memory reel. If you are to her what she is to you, she will know you never left.

“She knows. I just want her to see me.”

You are snow and breath and moonlight. She won’t see you.

“She will.”

The Universe sighed.

I sprouted as a snow tree in full bloom.

My Human ran to the garden, reached for a snow blossom, and I crumbled. She sobbed.

I told you.

“No,” I said to the Universe, after my Human began to laugh through tears, her warm fingers tracing ‘Angel’ on snow that used to be a tree… that used to be me. “I told you.”

.for Nina and her Angel

.a wee note…– Linked to the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads: Inside the Ink (Poetry and Flash Fiction with Magaly). Take a quote from the last book you read, and turn it into a three-stanza poem or a very short story… I chose the quote at the beginning of this post.